MOM

My born-in-Brooklyn mother was not cremated but the ashes of her existence rain down on me, like a cloud of forever billowing memory made from the chemicals of her lightness and the finely churned, scorched earth of her hidden sadness.

When we first met she was already an assemblage of everyone she had ever been.  I was simple. Wrapped in blue.  One flavor with one single experience under my belt: birth.

But Mom, Ina, who was 29 on the day that I arrived, 28 the day before, had already earned the civilian version of the purple heart, which is silently awarded to those who have been maimed and tortured in the wars of everyday life.  The official ceremony is held at random moments, in secret places, and is given not by angels but by the ghosts of anyone who has ever judged or dismissed us.  The music played during the ceremony is an anguished symphony of gasps and cries that to the untrained ear, sound like the ritual, plaintive wail of defeat.

There was irony in my birth which was as attached to me as the umbilical cord.  At least the cord could be severed in my lifetime.

When my mom was 8, a whirling dervish in the ether of the 1920’s, her parents, the nervous, necklace rattling flapper Reba and the by nature, pugilist drinker, Leo, the jewish Fitzgeralds as I like to think of them, who had danced frantically at their wedding to “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” as if it was their newly signed agreement enforced them to  move faster than life, went prowling out into the night in search of kicks and champagne, leaving my mom and her nanny to act by specific, domestic instruction (the kind that they cavalierly ridiculed in their flying high, without a parachute marriage).

While my mom played with her fancy-dancy dolls with their golden Mary Pickford ringlets and fried marble aqua blue eyes,  her tiny, tow-headed 4 year old brother, Harry, who was given to sudden fits of uncontainable boy joy, typically high on the rarified air of perpetual imagination, played with his green plastic soldiers who were ready to march and die right there on the carpeted battlefield  in honor of him.

In minutes Harry himself would be dead.

The nanny, a cheerful, sing-song, right off the boat immigrant of Swedish descent with an overly generous bosom who was no longer, poor, tired or yearning to be free,  perhaps driven by the need to light up her own mini torch, the ironically named Lucky cigarettes,  ducked out in pursuit of chemical addiction pleasure, leaving the two children to supervise themselves which, as, you will soon see, was a fatal decision, which resulted in fifty years of madness.

With her post vacated, the children did what children do.   They dove deeper and deeper into the bliss of fathomless play.

Ina soothed out tiny dress wrinkles and gave high-pitched voices to her most polite and complimentary dolls, while Harry barked, hut one, hut two, hut three, as his troops fell into a formation which signaled the beginning of the invasion of whatever pretend country General Harry was about to conquer.  

The soldiers marched their way through the twisted tufts of wall-to-wall fiber, and with a rebel yell, suddenly stormed the palace which was the softly cushioned bay window seat.  Up they climbed, defying moat and missiles, until they reached the top of the fort, where Harry, proudly planted the flag of victory.

It was a warm August night, which made him damp in his Dr. Denton uniform fatigues, which he would gladly have purged himself of, had he been able to master the mystery of the zipper.  Heady from the victory and soaked to the skin with the perfume of boy,  he rested his downy head against the metal screen of the open window.  The radio was crooning in the velvet background, which to him, sounded like mommy’s restorative lullaby, which he always drank fully like the elixir that it was.

The lulling tide of the moment turned the pasture of his universe into a field of welcoming down and cotton and suddenly, his eyelids began to slowly lower, like a pair of matching closing apertures at the end of a most poignant and satisfying Charlie Chaplin movie.  Mother Nature had arrived on tiptoe to tuck him in for the night which made him smile like a contented newborn whose entire being was infused with trust and the buoyant knowledge that everything that he would ever want would be luxuriously and perpetually provided to him.

The air smelled like evening dew and bottled sweet cream.  At that moment where everything is jelly and clay, he mistook the screen for Mr. Pillow. which caused the usually dependable, always checked latch to snap like kindling and out he went.

It was a blissful descent into what he thought was mommy’s warm arms.

Russ Columbo had just begun to sing, “Too Beautiful For Words” as the fireflies tried swarmed by instinct to cushion his fall while the stars horrified and helpless, looked away, unable to watch one of their own implode.

He was dead on impact, an obliterated, bloodied imprint now painted on the canvas of driveway concrete, with buckets of head blood, as lay sprawled and lifeless as any one of Ina’s dolls.

No one’s stories ever line up when recalling the particulars of a tragedy.   

Red to one person’s eye is yellow to another.  

Cold is hot. 

Left is right.

And everyone is right.

When we try to feebly construct our own, domino-line version of a tragic event, most of us fail miserably because we are programmed for optimism and survival and we tend to flood ourselves with torrents of good feelings.

The concept of personal annihilation is so inconceivable that it is our natural inclination to involuntarily cloud our judgment.

When it comes to tragedy, no matter how many times we are forced to experience it, at the most primitive of levels, we unconsciously fight to maintain our amateur standing for as long as possible.   

We will fight to the death, even in our senior years, to protect the substratum of our innocence.

Unfortunately, the aftershock of tragedy is unforgiving and the electric chair, near execution  of your central nervous system, is so damaging that when you finally crawl out of the sudden death of everything that you have ever known, you find that your DNA and all its attendant  instincts have been rearranged so haphazardly that you have accidentally been reconfigured without God’s permission.  

You are no longer the perfect example of his purest and most perfect form of creativity.

You are broken.  

Forever.

The best possible version of the truth leaks out slowly, drip by drip, over decades.

In the first, initial moments of a tragedy, when you find yourself walking in the epicenter of the blast, all you can do is move.  Or not move.  

There are no thoughts.  No sound.  

You are muted by pain.

My grandmother, when she returned home that night, dressed in silk and lace. crowned with a finery of peacock feathers,  collapsed into the pool of Harry’s blood and howled away her sanity, which burst out of her skull, never to return again.

My grandfather, who looked more Irish than Jewish, chose a much slower path towards self-destruction.  It took him a few years to convince his heart to crush itself until it resembled precisely what he saw in the driveway that night.

My mom was whisked out of the house, exiled to a neighbor’s house, tossed aside like an about to miss a train commuter ’s gum wrapper, and when she returned home a week later, the baby was dead and buried and never to spoken of again.  

The window had been bricked up.   

The drapes of the house, which by ritual, used to fling themselves wide open at the promise of a brand new day, would remain forever at half mast as if every moment of darkness was a reminder of what they had all allowed to happen. 

This, my mom, believed was the equivalent of the sentence that she has already imposed on herself.  

She was clearly a murderer.   

Harry had died because she had not watched over him.  

She had cared more about her dolls and her punishment was life without parole.

My grandmother, after Leo died, was left penniless so she held illegal card games in her attic, where tiny little Yiddish women with names like Malke, would ante up and try to beat their sister, cousins, and friends at cutthroat, high stakes penny poker.

My mom eventually married a very sweet, older man, Murray, who was timid and sweet, who, if he had been blessed with a tall, would have wagged it non—stop.  He was affable.  Friendly.  Kind.  Easy.  He was a glove salesman.  We’re talking deerskin and mink.  He loved to dandy himself up.  He wore monogram shirts,  sharp suits, and rakishly tilted fedoras.  He smoked pipes just like the wise dads on TV and often Bering Plaza cigars, which he sucked on like a pacifier, when he would drive us home  in a plume of smoke, in the oversized Army tank sized Hudson from the south shore  beach club, glowing like radium after a day of beach sun as William B. Williams would score our end of the night entertainment, showering us with songs from Sinatra, Bing, and Dean.

My sister was the first package that arrived at our garden apartment in Hollis, Queens.  

My mom finally got herself a real, actual doll, and that made her temporarily happy.  No threat there.

And then I arrived.

And here lies the big cosmic joke.

I could have been Harry’s tow-headed twin.

What happened to Harry, was not going to happen on my mother’s watch. 

My mom who was obsessive compulsive in a house where EVERYTHING had a place, launched a program that would literally keep me tied and tethered well into my early twenties.

She was never, ever going to let me out of her sight.

Her efforts, in hindsight, were masterful in the way that an unstable dictator's efforts can trigger, first national rapture, which inevitably leads to the pursuit of world domination which leads to all-out war.

I was tied to trees.  Watched at all times.  I was never allowed to sleep over at anyone’s house.  My mom was the class mother from kindergarten through sixth grade.  That was assured that wherever this lamb went, she was sure to go too.

She was strict.  Given to behind the scenes rages, which caused her to foam at the mouth, and come at me for the slightest indiscretion with leather strap and bulging eyes.

I was whipped into submission, until I was at, 16, able to hold her wrists and tell her to stop it.  Which she finally did.  Still, I was not allowed to go away to school.  I had to be within safe commuter’s back and forth distance.

Years before that, when I was still in single digits, in the 1950s  my grandmother, who was now severely diabetic and equal parts crazy, came to live with us, in the tiny, pressure cooker of a petri dish sized apartment with its museum-sized pictures of us, bold Hawaiian print couches, and an inexplicable wall-mounted, golden raja’s fan which seemed to fly over my dad’s favorite chair.  The house always smelled like pipe exhaust,  uninspired dinners whose recipes always included Campbell’s soup and my mom’s perfume which whose atomizers I often turned into expensive ray gun sprays.

In those days television had arrived which from day one,  became the immediate depository for all of our human emotions, which desperately needed to be expressed.  Instead, they were all Howdy Doodied and Ed Sullivaned into submission.

We treated that Dumont TV like a cherished, newborn, the baby Jesus,  staring at it with a sense of wonder for endless hours.

What was particularly emblematic was our family photo album.  In it, you would find endless pictures of slap happy relatives in daffy poses,  acting wildly inappropriate, then my sister and I would make our appearance at the sites of various special days….and then: you would turn the page and discover photos of dead, immolated Japs, taken by my Uncle Raymond when he was a usually in the brig, Marin in the South Pacific.

That pretty much sums up to me everything that needs to be said about my family. 

What is particularly crazy, was that it never seemed bizarre to me.

So while we ignored ourselves and each other, while we cared far more about Hazel and Little Joe than our fellow man, here is what was ignored:

My mom: crazy.

My grandmother: way crazier.

My dad: fearful, unwilling or unable to take any kind of risk.

My sister: nuts.

Me: a basket case.

The medicine cabinet was the Fort Knox of sedatives, which, during the sixties, became my own, personal go-to stash.

Growing up, I was the emotionally baffled golden boy, equally lambasted and lauded. 

To this day thanks to my mom’s stunning unpredictably and extremely different sides,  I still grapple with the question:  

Where does hate end and love begin?

Being that I never met a spotlight that I didn’t crave,  I despised having to compete with my grandmother for attention.

She was by this time a shattered hobbit of a human being, who would sit across the street, in a concrete playground, which had to be a kind of torment for her given her past relationship with concrete.  For hours, she would sit there, on a hard bench, by herself,  biting her nails until they hemorrhaged or she would trace the area around her mouth for hours until she wore away the skin and began to resemble circus clown legend, Emmett Kelly.

She watched her soap operas and American Bandstand, every single day.  I’m sure that the spontaneous joy of dance must have seemed beyond foreign to her, impossible to experience.   

She would watch it in silence, biting her nails like a ravenous woodland creature,  tracing her mouth, perhaps secretly wishing that someone would offer their hand and ask her to dance to the Everly Brothers.

But no one ever did.  Not even her ghosts.

I fought constantly with her, not being able to tolerate her ungainly habits.  She would growl at me and tell me that she was going to haunt me after she died.

Years later, her diabetes made the ultimate decision about the possibility of her ever getting her shot at the dance floor, by creating gangrene in her leg, which had to be eventually amputated.

We had to put the leg into a tiny coffin and drive it to her cemetery plot and bury it because according to the Jewish faith, all body parts must remain together.

My poor mom became Reba’s put-upon nurse.  She literally carried her to the bathroom like a newborn.

And more often than not, accidents did happen.

Eventually, she died.

And so did my dad.  When I was 24.  

 His heart, perhaps infused with too much selflessness and quiet desperation finally gave out like the pummeled boxer that it was.

I have now lived far longer without him than with him.

My mom continued to disintegrate in slow motion.  

Miraculously,  she re-married.  Twice.  Her second husband dropped dead on the kitchen floor during the high holidays.  Her third husband initially seemed like a nice enough fellah, until she became increasingly disabled, stricken by Parkinson’s Dementia which is God’s way of telling you: you think, Harry was bad?  Wait till you experience this.

Husband number three grew more and more exasperated and childlike and eventually passed her on to sadistic day nurses.  My mom became an inmate at a Boca Raton senior home which was run by outwardly cheerful Jamaican women, who would cheerfully talk to her like a four-year-old and put her to bed by four o’clock.  By then she had no memory.  No affect.  She drooled non-stop.   She had bed sores that to this day I think killed her.

Nice work, Florida.

I did have one nice visit with her in the end.  

I sat on her bed and softly sang her songs which I had sung in shows like The Fantastiks (the ironically titled "Try To Remember") which incredibly brought her back into this dimension for a second or one.

Out of nowhere, she asked about my kid’s godmother, Patty.

Her funeral attendance was like at the end of a Yankee game when they are losing badly.

All of her friends had passed.

It was like everyone had been checked off, one by one.

She was buried in some kind of primitive child-man husband had not gotten the funeral home one of her a more appropriate dress.

As for me,  I was in the throes of a clinical depression and an acute anxiety disorder, which would take me a good two more years, until I was able to relocate from hell back to sanity.

I was so medicated at her funeral, that I felt nothing.

I gave an eloquent speech, which the rabbi, who I did not know, asked for a copy of so he could use it as a template for when his wife died.

Now here it is, some ten years late, and I have still not been able to cry for her.

But I do feel for her now.

Deeply.

I think after years of drip, drip, drip, I finally understand her.

I wrote a play, which is about to premiere next month, where I married my propensity for fantasy with her very real tale of unimaginable suffering.

My take away was this:

None of us ever really grows up.   We are to the very end, perpetual children who are forever grappling with what we perceive as the unjust punishment which we received simply for being born.

We all have stories.  Most of them are behind the scenes tales of suburban madness, rejection, cruelty, and neglect.

But deep down inside, we are still those blue and pink putty newborns, whose then unconditionally loving parents lavished us with the kind of affection that is usually reserved for returning war heroes.

Which, in the end, is what we all are: returning war heroes.

We made it through the trenches of the wars that few if any have witnessed.  If we are lucky, we have been married at least once, have had a few kids who run as hot and cold as faucets and despite the fact that when it comes to love we are all left certifiably insane, some of us, may to our own amazement, still be willing to go out on yet one more tour of duty, as we put ourselves out there and search for someone new to love and torment us.  For some when it comes to that kind of war, well, it’s all that we know.

Whether we are willing to admit it or not, our parents, who in my case, were part of the great generation, sacrificed and served on a level that today’s generation can’t possibly understand.

They were the army of foot soldiers who got us here.  Who stood in harm’s way and took more than a few bullets for us.  Who doctored our wounds and fed us in their commissaries.  Who celebrated our victories, mourned our losses and agonized over our defeats.

And most of them never, ever, not once, complained.

I’m sorry that grown-up me, is not going to get a chance to sit with my mom of any age, hold her hand and take care of her the way that she for the most part, despite all the craziness, took care of me.   But I  will always be grateful for the galoshes.  For the overprotective layers of sweaters and coats.  The ear muffs and mittens.  The head to toe Coppertone slathering battles of a hot summer day.  The birthday cakes and candles.  The new clothes for school.  The years at summer camp. The family trips.  The comic book afternoons.  The Topps baseball cards which still smelled like stale bubble gum twenty years later.  The Broadway musical albums which became the soundtrack to our lives.

The infinite attempts at kindness.  

The dedication.  

The strength to prevail even on the day that my grandmother died, when my mom, who had been staring out of the living room window, crying like a broken-hearted four-year-old, perhaps looking for her mom to suddenly appear on the bench across the street, turned to me and said with eyes as wide as a Keane painting,  “I'm an orphan now.”

She kept going.  When she had a miscarriage,.  She kept going. When my dad died.  She kept going.   When she battled illness.  She kept going.  

And now, because of her, so can I.

So in her honor, come this Sunday, I am first going to put on a Bing Crosby song like “Swinging on a Star,” and I am first going to ask my grandmother to dance with me.

And then, I’m going to turn to my mom, and yes dance, but not before I take her into my arms and tell her how much I love her.  Appreciate her.

Both the child and grown-up version of me.

Happy Mother’s Day, mom.

#Mother's Day
#Family